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While it's notoriously tough for enterprises to find skilled developers for mobile and data science initiatives, a new report from Canonical indicates a skills gap is also affecting recruitment for the growing Internet of Things (IoT) space.

Personally, the things that makes IoT hard to learn is the hardware part of it. GPIO's, SPI's, bizarre funky WTF I'm going to guess mapping of pins to memory locations, picking a good library for direct I/O to said devices, and of course the awkwardness of command line and learning *nix, if you don't know it already, which is pretty much a must learn -- I haven't tried .NET Core yet on my Beaglebones. Other things that we take for granted (tons of disk space, tons of memory, tons of CPU performance) are all things most people will have to learn how not to take for granted, particularly when writing to a SIM card with a limited read/write lifetime. And of course, probably a new programming language (most likely Python) and if you want to do anything at the bare metal level, dust off those old "C" books!

Thankfully, there's tons of open source libraries and examples and some decent books to learn from.

It all reminds of the wild west days of homebrew computers, PET's, Apple II's, Z80, and so forth. Smaller package, more I/O, faster processors, more memory, and decent high level languages, otherwise, it's pretty much the same cacti, dessert sand, and barroom brawls.

It is easily argued that invasive technologies such as IOT are primarily designed to benefit surveillance states - the US being the largest of them! My suggestion to software developers is to invest in a few ethic courses before even thinking about updating your skill set.

A productive embedded developer is worth as much as SQL beginner. And he or she has to understand cutting edge, difficult to master GNU tools (C compiler, linker, assembler, make, OpenOCD), system programming (operating system, CPU, sometimes GPU, real-time, kernel level), a bunch of low level protocols, electronics, debug weird physical defects emanating from overheating or a spike, work with obscure IDEs, with little skill upgrade in years, and similar...

I do embedded at home, have written my operating system, but am not crazy to leave the business apps for half the pay. At present, the bang for the buck just isn't there. Perhaps, when I'm older and without plans and a mortgage. Cause it's fun.

I seriously doubt that there is a true "skills gap" here. I suspect it's more like most so-called "shortages" of qualified people : the only shortages are of people willing to work at the rate those employers want to pay. There ARE plenty of people who can do the job but the employers don't want to pay the going rate for people with experience. They often throw up their hands, write their congressmen and/or immediately donate to their campaign(s), and then go the H1B route. I have seen this sequence of events first hand more than once.

Engineers from the nonprofit say the bot learned enough to beat Dota 2 pros in just two weeks of real-time learning, though in that training period they say it amassed “lifetimes” of experience, likely using a neural network judging by the company’s prior efforts.